Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, coined the phrase to describe the amount of time parents spend reading aloud to their children. It will come as no surprise that affluent parents spend more “Goodnight Moon time” with their kids. In addition to spending an hour more with their children, affluent parents invest more in enrichment programs for their children, including after-school tutoring, band and sports.

But Putnam found white working-class families – often led by parents with no more than a high school education – are falling further behind in the amount of time and money they can invest in their children.

Putnam says every social institution – family, church, school, community organizations, friends and mentors – has failed these children, leading to their increasing social isolation. He says the collapse of the white working class family is "above all" traceable to the collapse of working opportunities and growing economic insecurity. Family structure – whether a child has one or two parents – accounts for a little less than half the decline, Putnam said in a video discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

“A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock. … Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.”

For Brooks, the solution is for liberals to “champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing” and for conservatives to “accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.”

His remedy for conservatives makes a lot of sense. Even Ronald Reagan embraced the earned income tax credit as the most effective anti-poverty program ever.

But Brooks’ analysis is diminished by his caricature of liberals as promoting out-of-wedlock births – Murphy Brown was a long time ago, and she was an affluent career woman, by the way.

The wrong way to address this problem would be to ignite another culture war. Putnam surely knew his research would be cherry-picked to refight old wars. This problem is too serious for that. We need economic solutions that help families now, not lectures on morality.